Finding Solace/Behind the Blue
by Poison Ivory
Summary: If Arnold kisses Lila & Helga kisses her beefcake boyfriend, & Lila & Beefcake are cheating with each other, does Arnold kiss Helga by proxy? And why does he want to? Rating for mild language...not that that'll stop anyone...


Author's Note: I finally did it! I finished one of the shorties I've been working on FOREVER! I'm so proud. And it's only six pages on Word…why did it take three months? Oh, well. Hope you like. Oh, and for those reading my long story Always, thank you for reviews (wow, thirty for one chapter!) and I will try and have the next chapter up ASAP—I have writer's block, curse it. I did write the chapter as a long poem, but I don't know if I like it enough to post. I'm still deciding.  
  
Disclaimer: Hey Arnold! and its characters are not mine, sadly. If they were, there would be a lot more merchandise out there, lol.  
  
  
  
Finding Solace/Behind the Blue  
  
As Lila's hands moved over my skin, I wondered why I didn't just break up with her. In olden days, a man who knew his woman was cheating on him and didn't do anything about it was less than a man, a cuckold. But this was now, and I was no man—just a 17-year-old boy whose girlfriend was sleeping with Cliff Thompson, the star of Gladhand High School.  
  
And Cliff's girlfriend, Helga G. Pataki? Well, who ever knew what she was thinking, anyway?  
  
Lila aimed for the spot on my neck—missing, as usual. As her lips met mine, I wondered about the sex-by-proxy trail. Helga had swapped saliva with Cliff, who had been with Lila recently—I could tell by the scent of cheap cologne on her; she wasn't a good sneak—who was now kissing me. So by admittedly strained logic, I was kissing Helga. And more.  
  
I wondered why that thought made me more excited than the girl unbuttoning her blouse for me now.  
  
True, Helga was no longer the ugly little thing of our elementary school days. She had filled out over the years, the lines in her face softening, until she was as long and lanky as a supermodel and just about the prettiest girl most of us poor mortals had ever seen. No one would have paired her up with Cliff, who was a good-looking hunk of beef but couldn't muster up enough brains to fill a teacup. Helga, on the other hand, was the editor of the literary magazine, just about the smartest kid in school besides Phoebe, and had an uncanny ability to see through bullshit. But if she knew about Cliff and Lila, she was letting it go on, just as I was.  
  
Thinking of her, I was suddenly disgusted by my own cowardice. She couldn't know. There was no way the Helga Pataki I knew would stand for that kind of betrayal. I pushed Lila away.  
  
"Baby, what's wrong?" she asked. At least she had dropped those annoying "ever so's" that had peppered the speech of her younger, purer self.  
  
"It's over, Lila," I said abruptly.  
  
Her brow furrowed. "What do you mean, Arnold?"  
  
"I know you've been sleeping with Cliff," I said evenly, as if it didn't bother me. And you know what? It didn't. The one I was concerned about was Helga.  
  
She looked shocked. "I…I would never…how could you even think…?"  
  
I snorted. "Knock it off, Li. You've been a bad liar since you were nine."  
  
She switched gears quickly, getting angry. "So what if I am? And you aren't cheating on me? Everyone does."  
  
I shook my head. "No, I'm not. And not everyone cheats."  
  
"Prove it. Name one person that you and I both know for sure doesn't cheat on his or her significant other. Besides you, St. Arnold." Ooh, she was really angry now. And what right did she have to be angry with me? She was cheating on me. Women.  
  
"Gerald and Phoebe."  
  
"Besides them."  
  
Um… "Helga Pataki."  
  
Lila got a strange look in her eyes. "Of course you would think of her."  
  
"What is that supposed to mean?" I asked, getting a bit riled myself.  
  
She gave me a withering look. "Never mind."  
  
There was a brief silence. Then I got up. "So…I guess I'll go now…" I said.  
  
"You can't break up with me!" Lila said suddenly. "Think of how it would look!"  
  
I sighed, not willing to get into the argument. "Look, if you really want to, you can say you broke up with me. As long as you don't tell anyone that you were cheating on me."  
  
"Why would I tell people that?" she asked, like I was some kind of idiot.  
  
I shrugged, exhausted from it all. "I honestly don't know. Good-bye, Lila."  
  
She didn't answer me. I let myself out the door of her house for the last time, tired but more content than I had been in ages.  
  
Suddenly my content evaporated. Helga. I had to tell her about Cliff. She had to know. I began to run towards her house, hoping she was home.  
  
As I ran, I worried over what Lila had said, that everyone cheated. Why was that? Didn't anyone believe in love anymore? My mind scanned over all the people I knew, all the shattered relationships, the bitter negotiations that had ended my three-year relationship with the girl I had pined for for eight long years of my life. Disappointment settled in the pit of my stomach. Maybe there was no love anymore.  
  
Suddenly a quote I had read the other day floated into my head. I was surprised I remembered it, but for some reason it had stuck in my memory. "Love belongs to Desire, and Desire is always cruel." I had read it putting together a yearbook layout after school the other day—I was Yearbook Editor.  
  
It had been Helga Pataki's personal quote.  
  
I didn't know much about love, but it seemed right to me. Then I wondered if I had ever really experienced love…or desire. Something I wanted so bad that it hurt. Something I couldn't take my mind off of.  
  
Then I realized, perhaps, why I was running so fast toward Helga.  
  
Her brownstone loomed into sight. I ran up the stoop and rang the bell, then leaned against the banister as I tried to catch my breath.  
  
Helga opened the door. "Arnold!" she exclaimed, seeing me. "What's wrong?"  
  
I supposed I must have looked half crazy, red in the face and breathing hard and my hair all messed up. And it didn't help that I was staring at her like I hadn't eaten in days and she was a large pizza with the works. She was wearing faded jeans, a pink tank top that managed to show just the smallest strip of belly, and a pink silk scarf in her pale gold hair. Her eyes were bluer than I thought eyes could be.  
  
"Helga, I…I…" My powers of speech were temporarily stolen from me as I fully grasped what I had almost figured out during my run.  
  
Her brow furrowed. "Spill it, Arnoldo. What's the deal?"  
  
If I had had any breath, I would have laughed for joy. Good old Helga. No bullshit here.  
  
"Can…can I come in?" I wheezed.  
  
"Um…sure. As long as you don't faint on my couch or explode or anything," she said, opening the door wider and letting me in.  
  
Despite her harsh words, she went and got me a cool glass of water, and then, all practicality, felt my forehead to see if I had a fever.  
  
"Okay, you're healthy," she decided. "Now drink before you pass out and tell me what you're acting so…football headed about."  
  
I took a drink and steadied myself, finally calming down. "Helga, I have two very important, very serious things to tell you. One is…" I hedged, finding it hard to break the news to her bluntly. "Well, Lila…what I mean is…I broke up with Lila," I finally blurted out, trying to get to it in a roundabout way.  
  
Helga nodded. "Because she's been seeing Cliff?"  
  
I gaped. "You knew?"  
  
"How dumb do you think I am?" she shot back.  
  
"All this time, you knew? And you didn't break up with him? Why not?"  
  
The answer was immediate. "Why didn't you break up with Lila?"  
  
To be closer to you, I thought, but didn't say it. I shrugged. "It was…too hard, I guess. I was…comfortable with her. It was a comfortable relationship. No passion, no fire…but it wasn't something I ever had to work at."  
  
She shrugged. "Why else do you think I would stay with a beefcake like Cliff?" She sighed. "I suppose I'll have to dump him now. You know, so that Lila and Cliff can find solace in each other's arms, and the school can whisper about it behind their hands and stare at us."  
  
"And where do we find solace?" I asked, meeting her eyes. She looked evenly back at me, and it seemed that there was a war going on behind the blue. Finally she looked away.  
  
"What was the other thing you had to tell me?" she asked, walking into the kitchen, obviously expecting me to follow her.  
  
I did follow her. I would have followed her anywhere at that point. "The other thing? Just that I…well…you see, the thing is…" My tongue seemed to have grown too big to fit comfortably in my mouth. "Is your father home?" I asked finally.  
  
She shook her head, looking in the fridge for something. "No. He and Miriam went down to Alaska for a three-day weekend to visit Ooolga. I decided that, tempting as the idea of a big old goopy family reunion was, I had too much work to do here."  
  
"Why did you torture me when we were little?" I asked abruptly, switching gears completely.  
  
She looked taken aback. "I don't know," she said finally. "You were there? Like Mt. Everest." I guess my eyes must have demanded further explanation, because she sat down on a stool in the kitchen and tried to elucidate. "I…I don't know. I was a mean little kid. Now I'm a mean big kid. I'm sorry. I guess I must've made you pretty miserable. I can't give you any other reason except that…well, you always seemed to forgive me. Maybe I was testing your limits."  
  
I stared at my hands. This might alienate her, and she was being surprisingly open to me at the moment. "My grandfather once told me that it was maybe because you had a crush on me."  
  
She was silent for so long I started to wonder if she was all right. "Maybe it was," she said finally. "Maybe I did. But that was a long time ago."  
  
I looked up at her red face. "Then why are you still embarrassed by it?"  
  
Abruptly, Helga got up and walked to the stairs. I cursed my ineptitude. I had done it. I had gone too far and made her put up her walls. But she stopped at the foot of the stairs and looked at me.  
  
"You coming or not, Football Head?" she asked. There was no sting in the nickname, almost an affection, a teasing flirtatiousness…no, I was imagining things. I jumped up and followed her up the stairs, feeling guilty and voyeuristic as I stared at her cute little rear moving behind the fabric of her jeans. Or did she want me to stare?  
  
She led me into her room, and I was mildly surprised. I remembered the few times I had been up here when we were younger, and her room had been right out of a book of nursery rhymes—pink patterned wallpaper and dolls everywhere. It was still pink, but pale and muted now, and the walls were half-covered anyway, with posters of old-school Madonna and Pink Floyd and old movie musicals tacked up. Clustered in one corner were a bunch of black and white photographs.  
  
I walked over to them to get a closer look and my jaw dropped. They were incredible! Stark, plaintive, and evocative, they looked professionally done.  
  
"Did you take these yourself?" I asked Helga.  
  
"Mm-hmm," she replied, sounding distracted. I glanced over my shoulder to see her rooting in her closet, apparently looking for something. Shrugging, I turned back to the photos.  
  
There was one of Olga, standing in the center of some room somewhere in a little black cocktail dress, clutching a purse nervously. Her eyes were enormous in her face, and the room was stark and white and enormous and cold. Something about the picture tugged at me. Helga might not like her sister, but she had certainly captured something about her most people didn't see.  
  
There were several of Phoebe—laughing in the sunlight with her hair in her eyes; standing in the hallway at school with a heavy bag over her shoulder, a dozen books in her arms, and a serious look on her face; leaning against Gerald, both looking serene and intense. There was the neighborhood, with its crumbling brick brownstones and colorful little shops, and one or two of Harold or Curly or Rhonda, captured perfectly and poignantly and more thoughtfully than I thought a picture could be.  
  
But the one that caught my eye was one of…well, me. It was a double exposure, one image sharp and focused, the other soft and blurred. The clear one was me, grinning at someone, squinting in the sunlight and looking more carefree than I had felt in a long time. But the blurry image, a little to the right of the first, captured a look I tried not to show many people; a wistful, forlorn, lonely look, like I bore the weight of the world on my shoulders and wanted to share the burden every so often. I was surprised. I almost never let that side slip out in public. The fact that Helga captured it meant that she must have been watching me very closely for a very long time.  
  
A nagging thought began to prickle at the back of my mind. I pursued it, trying to figure out exactly what it meant, but it disappeared before I could.  
  
"Got it!" Helga exclaimed triumphantly, appearing from the depths of her closet. She was holding something in her hands, something small and red. She tossed it to me, suddenly seeming to grow shy and turning to gaze out her window, hands in her pockets.  
  
I looked at what she had thrown to me. It was a little girl's red pump, a worn little high heeled shoe that was ridiculously mature for the age bracket it was for. A shoe? Why had she given me a shoe? Still, it looked very familiar…  
  
Suddenly I realized that I had this shoe's mate, hidden away in my basement somewhere. Cecile—well, fake-Cecile—had given it to me before she disappeared, eight years ago. I had kept the shoe in my room for a couple of years, hoping she would turn up again, but she never did. I had almost thrown out the pump, but hadn't been able to, so it had been relocated to the basement. So if Helga had the other shoe…  
  
"You were Cecile?" I asked incredulously, shocked that I hadn't figured it out after all these years. Helga nodded, still not looking at me. "But…why? And why do you have pictures of me up on your wall?"  
  
Helga stared straight ahead of her, her face and her voice expressionless. "I could tell you that I started the Cecile thing as a huge practical joke and then didn't have the nerve to pull it off. I could tell you that I just like the double exposure on that picture and it's not up there because it's a picture of you." She sighed. "I could…I could tell you a lot of things."  
  
Still not looking at me, she walked over to the bed and sat down. "I could tell you that I've never snuck into your room at night. I could tell you that it wasn't my little pink book you found, my parrot, my locket. I could tell you that I didn't pretend I was blind or suffering from amnesia to be close to you. I could tell you that I didn't talk all the other girls out of playing Juliet so that I could kiss you, just once." She paused. "I could tell you that I didn't used to be madly, painfully, desperately in love with you. Or I could tell you the truth."  
  
I stood there in stunned silence for a few minutes, letting everything sink in. All the pieces fell into place, all the little mysteries that had puzzled me about Helga suddenly became clear. Except one. She scrutinized me as I pondered, not interrupting my thoughts.  
  
Something was still digging at me, though. "Used to be?" I asked, looking at her.  
  
She looked at her hands. "I…I don't know anymore," she whispered. "I think I'm not, and then…sometimes, when you're close to me…"  
  
I walked over to the bed and, taking her hands, pulled her gently to her feet. I cupped her face in my hands and made her look at me. "Close like this?" I asked.  
  
She pulled away. "Please, Arnold…don't…" She started for the door.  
  
I grabbed her shoulder. "Are you sure you don't know? Know for sure?"  
  
She jerked out of my grasp. "Arnold, don't! Stop it."  
  
"I love you."  
  
The words were out of my mouth when she was halfway through the door. "What?"  
  
The last niggling doubt fell into place. I knew. I *knew. No more holding onto it for a few clear, bright seconds. I knew.  
  
"I love you," I said. "That's number two. The second thing I came over here to say. I'm in love with you."  
  
She turned around, slowly, and I saw that her eyes, those beautiful, beautiful eyes, were bright with tears. "Don't tease me, Arnold."  
  
My voice was low and earnest as I walked towards her. "I'm in love with you, Helga Geraldine Pataki."  
  
"Why?"  
  
The question stopped me for a minute. "Why? Because…because you shot spitballs at me and I would tally them up every day to make sure you weren't ever shooting less, that you weren't forgetting about me. Because I saved the sweaters you ruined with paint and pudding…because you called my name out during the flood, when you fell out the window. Because you have blue eyes and blond hair and your middle name is Geraldine. Because you're you. Why does there have to be a reason? I love you because I do. Why do you love me?"  
  
She smiled through her tears. "Because you answered my question."  
  
And Helga ran into my arms, and then there were no more questions and no more secrets, only answers and surprises and sweetness. And after seventeen years of living the same town, a lifetime, I had finally come home. 


End file.
